“There’s not much more. The scarecrows suddenly become real women. Dead. Some of them look at me. And I hear someone talking. He thinks he’s the Devil—but he’s real.”
She spoke the words almost lightly, as if the dreams had no power over her. But he knew she was telling him the truth—and that the dreams terrified her far more than she was willing to admit.
“You know, you’re just falling prey to the power of suggestion,” he said gently.
“Your turn,” she said, ignoring his words.
He arched a brow. “I think there’s more.”
She shook her head, smiling. “I’ve given you pretty much the whole of it. That’s everything I can remember,” she said. “Except sometimes I see the cemetery in my dreams, too.”
“Because Mary was last seen in the cemetery, that’s why,” Jeremy told her.
“Probably.” He could hear the edge of doubt in her tone, even though she was trying to hide it.
He frowned suddenly, feeling a little spasm of unease. “You need to stay out of the cemetery.”
“Don’t worry about me and the cemetery. I’ve known it since I was a kid. I could probably draw you a map of it with my eyes closed. Now. Your turn,” she persisted.
He crooked an elbow behind his head and stared up at the ceiling. “I had awful nightmares after my folks died. I got past those because of Aidan. He kept telling me I had to be strong for Zach. He was the one pulling to keep us all together, so we shaped up fast. The only movies that ever really scared me were the Nightmare on Elm Street series, I guess because they made me realize how helpless we are when we’re asleep.”
“Those movies scared me, too,” she assured him. “I think they scared everybody. What I wasn’t frightened by were all the movies about idiot teenagers who went off exploring the same place where dozens of other idiot teenagers had already been killed. I was never going to be stupid enough to do that.” She got a strange look in her eyes then, and she quickly looked down and traced her fingers in a line down his chest, creating a stirring in his groin.
Was she trying to distract him? he wondered. Or herself?
Neither, apparently.
She was being persistent.
“You had a nightmare last night,” she said.
“I did?”
“And you were talking to someone in the middle of it.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. But I think you do.”
He was annoyed to feel color suffusing his cheeks. At least they were in the dark, so she wouldn’t see.
He felt strange, though, as he opened his mouth and admitted, “Billy.”
“Billy?” she repeated softly, questioningly.
“Well, you know my story already. Billy was the boy who was alive when I reached him. I got him to land, up on the embankment, and gave him CPR. He was alive. His heart was beating, and he had a pulse. I talked to him. I rode with him in the ambulance. I could swear that he looked at me, that he thanked me, that he knew me…and then, at the hospital, he was declared DOA.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Being a forensic diver…you see horrible things. You wonder how one human being could ever perpetrate such cruelty on another human being. But there was something about those kids…They never had a chance. They went from one abusive home to another.” He was silent for a moment, feeling the empathy in her eyes. “Hell, according to the psychologists, after what they’d been through, they probably would have grown up to be monsters themselves.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I believe it can happen. I also believe that we’re all responsible for ourselves. That whatever went on when we were young, once we’re adults, we have to get over it and become the people we want to be.”
She rested her head on his chest. “And what about others?” she asked. “Can we make them into what we want them to be? Should we want to change them, or can we grow to accept that people are different?”
He frowned and shifted, looking down at her, her face averted, the wealth of her silky black hair fanning over him in a way he was afraid he was getting much too used to. Her tone had been wistful and deep, and he knew what she was talking about. She was talking about the two of them, because she was no fool, and she knew that when they had first met, he’d thought she was either a sham or on the mentally unbalanced side.
He touched her hair. “I think we’re crazy if we don’t learn to see the world from every angle,” he told her, surprised at the tremor in his own voice.
And even more surprised that he meant it.
He lay there then, his hand on her hair, her cheek against his flesh. He closed his eyes, knowing he wouldn’t sleep again but hoping she would. And that her sleep would be free of dreams.
No matter what, though, dreams or no dreams, he would be there.
Was this love? Could a man fall from “avoid this woman at all costs” into sexual attraction-fascination-obsession and from there into love?
How the hell could either of them really know, when this had all grown so intense at the rate of a speeding bullet?